1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for processing data entities by a data processing system, the data entities being associated with respective points of a domain. The invention further relates to a computer system for executing the method, and a computer program product containing code portions to execute the method.
2. Description of Prior Art
Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) is emerging as an important technology in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for elucidating the internal structure of the brain and characteristic pathologic conditions affecting the integrity of the nervous system.
DTI measurements of the brain exploit the fact that the network of neural fibers has a characteristic microstructure that largely constrains the diffusion of water molecules along the direction of the fiber. Diffusion Tensor Imaging enables the fiber tracking of neural fibers which is also known as tractography. A three-dimensional (3D) measurement domain is divided into small volume elements, called voxels, representing image data on a regular grid. For each voxel, a Fractional Anisotropy value is calculated from three eigenvalues of the 3D diffusion tensor. Starting the fiber tracking algorithm from every voxel with a fractional anisotropy value greater than 0.4 is highly compute-intensive. Currently, these “seed points” are limited to user-defined regions of interest (ROI). Because of many branching, crossing, touching and merging fibers, starting the fiber trace algorithm from every possible seed point results in more realistic images.